Why Would You Believe That Strangers Want to "Take Care of" You?

Question: what should be done in the case of the person who hasn’t the money to afford health insurance, but who drives a “pimped ride” with extra-large tires, broad spokes, “spinners”—the whole bit representing an investment of at least $60,000? What if the person without coverage owns a wide-screen, high-def TV? What if he or she eats out twice a day, or goes a-gambling at least once a month? What about the person who attends two or three MLB games and as many NFL games per year and also allows him- or herself a trip to the beach over the summer?

I’m outraged at the cost of my health insurance; and yet, I pay far less for it yearly than any of the people above would likely sink into his or her manège during the same twelve months. My family and I choose to deny ourselves several luxuries and frivolities (including all of those just named) so that we may have something which comes closer to a necessity.

In effect, then, we are all (or all of us who pay taxes, which becomes a larger group with every week of the Obama Administration) being confronted with a “luxury subsidy”. We will pay more for insurance in the long run—through taxes—and have less service at the clinic with longer waits so that certain of our brethren may continue to squander their money and leave their families uninsured (i.e., insured by the “public option”).

Truth be told, much of the opposition to insurance companies would have been diffused a couple of years ago if Republicans had been allowed to pass a tax deduction for the self-insured. This initiative was blocked by the Democrat-controlled House, however. Why? Precisely so that a constituency for public health care could be created. As malodorous as Republican leadership was during the Bush years, with Congress sitting quietly by as the executive branch devoured more and more powers not permitted to it by the Constitution, Republicans were at least under the impression (the illusion, some of us were say) that the nation stood in imminent danger. For years, most Democrats have been ruled by no objective more noble than the manufacture of a permanently dependent class which could be relied upon to support at the polls a permanent ruling elite.

The situation has substantial irony. Growing up, I was surrounded by the popular notion (not entirely a myth) that Republicans secured the interests of big business, while Democrats watched out for the little guy. While Republicans labored to ensure that stocks paid nice dividends (a boon to the frugal petite bourgeoisie to which my family belonged—hence not just a service to fat cats), Democrats fought to keep the profit margin from gobbling up shop safety and humane terms of leave. Republicans preached tough love: you can make it if you really try, they argued, and privation will give you the will to try harder. Democrats indicted the homily’s hypocrisy: many of us will NOT make it, they underscored, because we were not born into the affluence and influence which you Republicans take for granted.

It occurs to me that an odd turn-about is evolving right under our noses, as is illustrated especially well by the health care “debate”. Under the Democratic plan, the little guy will in fact be worse off than he is now without any coverage at all. Were he to be carried in red ruin to an emergency room today, our poor schmuck would not be left in the waiting room to bleed out: public funding would cover his immediate needs. Even if his problem were less dramatic—if his child, say, could not afford new glasses—most doctors would cut him a deal on an exam and a pair of specs (contrary to the mercenary picture which our President has painted of the profession). Under every form of revision which has yet been proposed, the same person would face a rationing of care, longer waits, a scarcity of doctors, a bureaucracy-heavy slovenliness of attention, and a stagnant research-and-development sector. Inevitably, rich people would continue to get special treatment—more than ever—whether in the form of jetting to specialists in other countries or simply in that of employing their own unregistered doctors on the sly. When abortion was illegal, rich girls took sudden vacations and came back restored; poor girls bled to death in soiled beds after swallowing some quack’s poison. So it will be in Obama’s Tomorrow.

The little guy doesn’t win in this game—and he isn’t supposed to. Driving about town unemployed in his Cadillac (or whatever “green” equivalent he clunked it in for), he is an insufferable drain upon a system already bankrupt—not merely bankrupt, but deeply in the hole for decades to come. One way or another, he will have to be disposed of. He doesn’t understand this yet: he’s still voting just the way his handlers want him to—and they, for a short while, will pay him off out of the rich man’s pocket. Sooner rather than later, however, he will vote in various ways to abrogate his right to vote. He will make cannon fodder of himself. Those who depend upon others for everything and have only their vote to render in the bargain will at last be stripped of their vote. Waiting interminably at the doctor’s office during a pandemic for a vaccine in short supply is one probable scenario. When those of the poor folk who are ambulatory riot in the streets, the police will cut them down… and then the rich will be charged with calling out the troops, and the elite will carry the poor vote in the last election that ever takes place in this moribund nation, and… and on to a medieval society whose power structure is girded in high-tech chain-mail.

THIS is why we are being precipitated into the abyss of “reform”. It may not happen just yet—there are reasons to believe that many Americans now see through the health-care smoke screen. The gambit will be repeated on another part of the chess board, however. Again and again and again. As I keep writing in this space, do NOT suppose that any group of human beings other than your family will “take care of you” without a hidden agenda. Why would you be so foolish?